The short mat Team departed Victoria for Sweden at the civilized hour of 12:20 . David, Chris and Andrew arrived at the airport with Cathy Denny at the wheel of David’s Ford Escape. Thank you Cathy. The check-in was uneventful except that David left one of his bags in the car…David’s frantic call to the car retrieved the situation….the car circled back to the airport….thank you Cathy for answering the call. I understand the first thing that Cathy said was “alright what have you forgotten!” Anyway, all’s well , and we are underway. Mitch joined us at the airport, so all we need now is Brent who is Copenhagen but will join us, hopefully, in Gothenburg.
Uneventful passage through Vancouver airport, and we are currently underway and 35,000 feet over Greenland, and halfway to Frankfurt. It’s pitch black, so the view of Greenland is non existent. Five hours to go and two hours to breakfast. The connection in Frankfurt is a bit tight with only one hour so, I hope the plane is not late! It is bit complicated because of the time change on Sunday morning. I’m not sure that means we get an extra hour for our connection, an extra hour less or whether it’s all been accounted for…..we’ll see when we get there!
Well, we connected with the flight out of Frankfurt after a long traipse through the airport only to be confronted with more security screening and then a bus ride to the aircraft on the tarmac. Made it with a few minutes to spare; squeezed into a full aircraft. Short flight to Gothenburg of an hour and a half, but not uneventful. We were on the approach to Gothenburg when the captain said they were doing a fully automated landing and I know why know; the runway was not visible until we were 20 feet above it. Poor visibility in the fog. Anyway, we landed safely.
In the luggage carousel we received a text from Brent to say that he was on the bus going to the airport so that was welcome news! Our driver had arrived from Copenhagen. After much negotiating with AVIS, we had our 9 seater van with manual shift. The only problem, our driver (Brent), couldn’t find reverse gear to get out of the parking lot. Now that would have been embarrassing to have to go back to AVIS and ask them where reverse was! Anyway it was found after a lot of back-seat driving and we were on our way to Gothenburg which went smoothly until we hit the outskirts of the city where we encountered slow going with heavy traffic mostly made up of large trucks. The city centre was quaint with lots of trams in the middle of the road which made for slow going. However we made the hotel called “The First Hotel G” which was rather like a hotel done out by IKEA. After a quick rest, we all went out to the sushi restaurant for a quick meal and now we are crashing out after a long day.
We will be on our way to Stromstad tomorrow. Stay tuned for more adventures.
Andrew, David, Chris, Brent and Mitch